LIMMUD FSU Recharge Presenters 2017

Jars Balan is an author, editor, and literary translator who has published numerous scholarly and journalistic works on Ukrainian and Ukrainian-Canadian themes. Since 2000 he has served as the Coordinator of the Kule Ukrainian Canadian Studies Center, for the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Born and raised in the Bathurst Manor district in North York, he is a graduate of William Lyon Mackenzie Collegiate and the universities of Toronto and Alberta. His areas of academic specialty are Ukrainian-Canadian history, literature and theatre. In this capacity, over the years he has written works on a number of Ukrainian-Jewish themes, including an essay on the anarchist Makhnovist movement - published in the collection A Sharing of Diversities: Proceedings of the Jewish Mennonite Ukrainian Conference, “Building Bridges” (1999) - and most recently an article for the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter (UJE) about the friendship between the renowned painter William Kurelek and his art dealer, Av Isaacs.